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Station Chief Ousted as CIA Spies Found in German Parliament and Spy Agency

July 11, 2014 - 4:31am  lindorff

What's a little espionage among 'friends'?

by:

Dave Lindorff

Germany, after all, has a powerful economy -- one that, driven as it is by a strong manufacturing sector and a solid trade surplus, including with the US, in many ways is much stronger than the US economy. Germany has no need to worry about any risk of US trade sanctions, the way most countries do that consider trying to stand up to the US. Nor does Germany need to rely on the US military for protection. The country faces no threat from any direction. (As anti-war activist David Swanson puts it in his column US out of Germany, “Protection from Russia? If the Russian government weren't demonstrating a level of restraint that dwarfs even that of the Brazilian soccer team's defense there would be full-scale war in Ukraine right now. Russia is no more threatening Germany than Iran is preparing to nuke Washington or the U.N. is confiscating guns in Montana.”)

Why, one has to ask, would such a powerful country put up with the crap that the US is doing here, which even includes the tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone (as disclosed in documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden), or paying spies to rat out the inner workings of a Bundestag intelligence committee?

I suppose one logical explanation would be that there is enough corruption and political wheeling and dealing behind the scenes here that, knowing how deeply compromised they have been during a decade of NSA monitoring of their communications, the political leadership of Germany -- both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats -- must be afraid (like their spineless counterparts in the US Congress) to take a stand against further US spying abuses.

Still, there is bound to be a limit to what the German public will tolerate, particularly in a country that has such raw memories of what it was like to live in a police state. After all, there is the history of the Nazi regime, and much more recently, of the Stasi state in East Germany, which only ended in 1990, and whose massive and all-pervasive spy apparatus and its predations have been luridly exposed over the course of the intervening years.

Radack accused the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic politicians in the German Bundestag of being cowards, both in their hearings into the US spying operation in Germany and the cooperation the NSA had received from the BND, and in their unwillingness to grant asylum to Snowden, given all the information he had provided about the NSA’s spying on Germany and the German people.

Drake warns Germans in that Spiegel article that national security in the US has at this point become a kind of “state religion.” That's a statement which should send a shudder down the spine of any German familiar with the country’s recent history.

This is a sordid story that is not going to go away, even if the current US station chief does.

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